The Wonder of God’s Love

Isaiah 40: 28 – 31

June 29, 2025

Growing up, I belonged to one of those families that were always at the church. Oh sure, all of us kids were members of every sports team available to us, regardless of the season. My dad was a member of the navy fighter jet community and so military life - with frequent deployments and scary stories of training accidents and deaths - were a regular part of our life. Our church drew a lot of its membership from the large military housing complex in Pacific Beach, our pastor was a Navy Reserve Chaplain, and so the church was a primary – probably THE primary touchstone in our lives.

We belonged to the Navy. We belonged to various fighter squadrons. But most importantly, we belonged to Christ Lutheran Church. Church was a place to belong. Church was a place that defined what we should think about God and the world. Belonging and believing carried us….. until, on one fateful day, it failed miserably.

My father was killed in Viet Nam. That meant that we no longer qualified to live in the house we had been in for 7 years. We were no longer Navy and so we didn’t belong. Oh, they let us finish the school year – there was two and a half months left of that. But then we had to leave. Military movers came one day, put almost all of our belongings in boxes and then put those boxes in storge while we went back east to visit relatives. That gave our Mom time to figure out if we were going to stay back east or return home to San Diego.

Of course, we kids wanted to go back to San Diego. That was home. But Mom was now a single mother with four kids under the age of 14. She had no job. No prospects. No training. But we had the church. They actually created a full time job for my Mom. I can’t imagine it paid that much, but when combined with military survivor benefits, we got by. So back to San Diego we went.

With help from relatives our Mom purchased a small home in Pacific Beach. We kids stayed on our sports teams. 3 men from our church adopted me and made sure that I got invited to every Padres, Chargers, Gulls, or Rockets sporting events. In many ways, I credit those 3 men – especially Chuck Stadler – for saving my life.

You see, I was one angry kid. The military had failed us – my dad never made it home. Sports were fun, but they were seasonal and always driven by the fathers on the team. Church was still a big presence, my Mom was on staff and we were always there.

We belonged, but there was a problem. I no longer believed. Oh, I guess, to be accurate, I still believed there was a God. I just didn’t want anything to do with a God that allowed not only my dad to be killed, but also 5 of my friend’s fathers to be killed in that same year.

Middle school – we called it Junior High School – through 11th grade were really difficult for me. First it was just light stuff – not caring about homework, not always being respectful of authority figures. But by ninth grade I was throwing desks out windows, flicking burning matches up on to the ceiling, and terrorizing the weaker and more inexperienced teachers. My locker buddy and I got suspended for having a bottle of Jack Daniels in our locker.

In high school, even as I was playing varsity sports, being elected captain of those teams, and getting Division 1 scholarship offers I was a part of a group that thought drinking, fighting, and doing other things was just fun. One of my best friends would later become the largest cocaine dealer in northern San Diego. Another was one of the largest dealers of pot in Clairemont. While drugs were really never much of my thing, alcohol and fighting was.

I don’t know where I was headed, but it was nowhere good. My parents – by then my mom had remarried a wonderful man – my parents had quit making me go to church. I was just angry, unhappy, and going nowhere good fast.

But God never gave up on me, even when I had given up on myself. In May of my junior year in high school I met a girl who, after an absolutely disastrous first date, told me she wouldn’t go out with me again unless I went to church with her.

I did, and for the first time learned about a faith that was more than believing certain things, in a certain way, in a particular form. To be fair to my earlier church, maybe it was there, but I was just too angry, too unhappy to see it. For the first time I was hearing about a faith that was built – not on a particular form – but in a particular relationship. I was told, for the first time, that God was not the one ultimately responsible for my father’s death. Those deaths were the responsibility of a broken humanity.

God wasn’t the cause. God was the answer and that understanding grabbed me and transformed my life. You see, the post-WWII church had turned faith into a dogmatic listing of right beliefs, and membership in the church into doing certain things, in a certain way, in a particular prescribed style. It was such a narrow, even tribal view of religion. Faith is so much more.

The God that I had rejected now became the major source of rebuilding my life. To use the language from our scripture lesson, I had grown spiritually faint, overcome by a sense of powerlessness, and had run myself into exhaustion chasing after every self-centered opportunity I could envision. I had spun myself into a ditch and my self-destructive behavior meant it was only a matter of when, not if, I was going to do something to myself that I couldn’t recover form. What was worse, I didn’t care.

But God never gave up on me. No matter how far I ran; no matter how low I sunk; God waited for me to turn back to God as the only answer to the brokenness that was destroying me. God was patient and filled with grace.

As a result of God’s faithfulness, and Becky’s demand that I go to church with her, my life has been forever changed. Oh, that doesn’t mean it hasn’t had its rough moments. But my life is no longer endangered by the storms of life.

And church….. church….. church is no longer a place where we get squeezed through some little religious mold making sure that everyone thinks exactly the same, looks mostly the same, or are conducting themselves like little religious robots that insists on the correct form.

Friends, Faith is not a religion of particular convictions, held in a particular way, and dressed in a particular form. Let’s be overwhelmingly clear: Jesus Christ is our Lord and Savior. We believe that it is only through Jesus that we are restored to the relationship with God for which we were created. We have a power and a clarity of faith available to us in the Holy Spirit.

But we also have freedom. A freedom born out of a transformation that occurs when we declare Jesus as our Savior and Friend. We are surrounded by churches that are telling us we have to think a certain way. We are surrounded by churches and people that are telling us that we have we to do certain things, in certain ways, in certain amounts. Our culture wants to generate lists of who is in and who is out.

And yet God tells us that those who remain connected to him in relationship; those who embrace their redemption in the saving work of Jesus; those who are filled by the Holy Spirit – all of those gathered together in a shared relationship with this God – THAT’S the church – in all of its faults and glory. THAT church will soar as though on the wings of eagles!

Transformed. Connected in relationship with God and one another. So transformed by that relationship that they are filled with love for God and God’s people and compelled to serve. That’s the church. A church filled with joy and wonder. A church journeying together but honoring individual relationships and expressions. That’s the church! It saved my life….. and it can save yours. Together we can soar! Amen.